Best Blockchain Use Cases for IRL Events

Did you ever wonder how ancient humans started writing?

It wasn’t because a scientist wanted to do some calculations or a writer wanted to write a legendary story. It was actually an accountant who just wanted to keep track of grains, live stock, and other goods in a kingdom.

Writing was first developed to maintain a ledger or, more specifically, to keep track of accounts. When people started living in larger communities, they needed a way to keep track of who owned what and how much they had. This was essential for trade.

The first writing was probably just a series of notches on a stick or tally marks carved into stone to keep track of how many sheep someone owned, for example. Over time, people developed symbols to represent specific objects, and then strings of symbols to represent ideas.

Blockchains are the newest innovation in the ancient habit of maintaining ledgers. Blockchains are ledgers that are maintained by everyone and no one at the same time.

What? How is that possible?

Blockchains use consensus mechanisms to add any transaction. Consensus means “agreement among people,” so it is a decentralized way of keeping a record. So it’s a way to maintain a public ledger where everyone can see what transactions are happening and who is doing them.

It’s also a way to verify that those transactions are legitimate.

The way consensus works is that everyone has a copy of the blockchain, and when someone wants to add a transaction, they announce it to the network. Then, everyone verifies that the transaction is legitimate, and they add it to their copy of the blockchain.

Once the transaction is added to everyone’s blockchain, it is considered confirmed.

So, without wasting any time, let’s dive into how blockchains can revolutionize the IRL industry!

Before understanding use cases, let’s first go through types of events and how blockchains can actually help in implementing them.

We are constantly participating in different events without even realizing it. There are two types of events,

1. Public Events
2. Private Events

Let’s understand both and how blockchains can fit here.

Public Events

There are many events in our lives that are lived in a public arena. These events are usually where a huge number of people from different walks of life come together for a certain activity. It can be anything, from attending a football match to attending a music festival. Without wasting any time, let’s dive into them!

1. Sports: These are pretty self-explanatory events, be it a football match or the Olympics. We are brought together by sports, and these events have a huge impact on society! These are events that are occurring at the same place and have solid infrastructure with them. With that said, the combined sports industry stands at close to $500 billion.
2. Live events: These are huge events that like-minded people attend. These are usually hosted in a venue where around 10 to 100 thousand people can attend. These are events managed by a huge team and are usually gated by tickets. These events can change venues depending on how many people will attend them, and they also require good infrastructure to be held. events like concerts, music festivals, or even launch events like Apple’s annual launch. These can be random and hosted in different venues.
3. Open public events: These are public events that are usually hosted by an organization on a smaller scale, so not many people attend them at once. These events enable a lot of people to attend them at different times. The same place hosts all of these events, but they don’t need a strong infrastructure to happen. Events like fairs, college festivals, or even business fairs cater to a limited set of audiences.
4. Fixed venue events: These are events that happen in the same place, but the type of event or type of entertainment changes over a certain amount of time. These are fixed infrastructures that enable different kinds of specific events to be held. The capacity of these can range from 100 people to 5,000 people. These are mostly events like going to a movie theater, an amphitheater, or a theater. Events like different music shows, plays, or movies determine the audience in the venue.
5. Non-religious festivals: These are also huge events, with a large number of people simultaneously attending them all at once. But the key attraction of the festival isn’t just one performance but an itinerary of different performances or interviews. Most of the time, these are hosted on large, solid infrastructures in the same place on the same day every year. Here, access to different events can be gated, or there can be just one pass for everything. Events like Comic Con, the Sunburn Music Festival, or different movie festivals around the world fall under this category.

That pretty much covers all the public events one can experience in life. Let’s now move on to how blockchain comes into play here!

Blockchain use cases:

1. Maintaining an easy ledger: The main issue with public events is maintaining a huge ledger. This can be anything from just verifying ticket purchases to looking up different tiers of tickets for a certain event. Blockchains can help here by keeping an immutable ledger so that it doesn’t take much work to keep it up-to-date. This can be a private blockchain, but there is a huge volume of transactions because they are irreversible.
2. Betting Escrows: We discussed sports events in the above section. Betting is usually a big industry that allows people to gamble on their favorite horses or predict a win for Manchester United. These can be easily accomplished using escrows enabled by smart contracts, which make them trustworthy and secure!
3. Ticketing: NFTs as tickets can actually solve a lot of problems of ticket counterfeiting and also serve as a symbol for attending a certain event. Projects like Metapass are already doing this in real life, having recently partnered with Superteam DAO to host Supermeets in various cities.
4. Recording the event: Recording an event is an important aspect to consider for public events. Blockchain can help here by storing immutable data in the form of metadata and non-metadata. This can be easily done by storing IPFS links on the blockchain. The future of storing media on the blockchain is pretty huge and can present itself with a lot of problems to be solved.
5. Marketing budget shifts to Incentivising budget: Massive events usually spend a lot of money on advertisements to inform people about the event. To be precise, they hire influencers to promote their event. With blockchains, the venues would have the wallet addresses of all people who are likely to attend a similar event. So, you partner with the venue, and now you can airdrop some vouchers or tokens to people directly instead of hiring different influencers. This also creates loyalty among the audience and links the event organizers with the public directly instead of going through a middleman.
6. Payments: Payments have always been the USP for any blockchain-based application. Simple payment, with guaranteed status, is faster than most other available payment methods, including traditional means.

Private Events

While public events are usually open to anyone and everyone to attend, we also have private events. A private event is usually an event (in the same context as public events) that is exclusive to a certain set of people. It can be a gathering of like-minded people or people from similar industries and different domains. Let’s look at what these events are and how blockchain can help with them.

1. Private celebrations: These are events in which people invite a fixed group of people and are usually hosted at the same place. With parties, these can involve more than 100 people. These usually occur on holidays and usually involve a happier mood with very minimal formalities occurring between them. Events like weddings, birthdays, and even office celebrations can fall under this category.
2. Conferences: These are events that involve people from similar industries and share an interest in a similar domain. Most of the time, these have very strict rules, last for days, and need a lot of infrastructure to run. These usually involve people from a particular field or from an organization. Events like Web3 Conference India and Solana Riptide would be the best examples here.
3. Hackathons: These are events that involve a fixed set of people, but they are usually focused on producing work. These usually involve programming and similar disciplines. These usually involve teams that, after a given period of time, present their work to a jury for judging. Hackathons usually have a quality set of audiences who are more than interested in work and not just in attending. The best examples would be Solana Hackerhouses and Eth Global events.
4. Meetups: These are events that are open to people with a shared interest in a particular topic. They are often organized in places where there is a need to develop an audience that is interested. Meetups are usually easy to organize with a relatively small audience. These can occur within startups that are remote.

That pretty much sums up the private events section. Let’s move on to the blockchain use cases in these events:

Blockchain use-cases:

1. Incentivizing the attending audience: With conferences, you have a fixed group of people, and for most of them, the spectators or attendees are not really interested in the work you present. By using a simple QR code, you can airdrop a small number of tokens, which can help prevent them from leaving in the middle of your talk.
2. Incentivizing and tokenising participation: Private events can also depend on digital assets as a way to incentivize good participants. This can be according to the power law curve so that a person who attends the event regularly can earn more rewards as compared to a new person attending the event. Also, the fact that digital assets are transferrable is a huge boost to the participant, given that a lot of people have a digital asset wallet and not a bank account.
3. POAPs: Incentivizing good participation also comes with the benefit that POAPs (Proof of Attendance POAPs) can be used to ensure that only people who attend would be getting rewards. These can be an NFT of some sort, which can serve as proof of attendance and efficiently work as a ticket at the same time. If a person has an NFT, they can directly scan the QR code to indicate that they’re at the gate and attending the event.

Conclusions

Blockchain is still pretty new in terms of adoption on a global scale. Most of the blockchain use-cases are still being tried out in the very early stages of Web 3. With that said, with ledgers being a necessity in the human world, we believe that this technology is just waiting to explode. There might be many more use cases that we missed, but we would love to see those too.

With that said, blockchain technology won’t entirely change how events are conducted, but it is more of an upgrade to some of the current technology. This would eventually change some aspects of how we attend events, but mostly it would be a layer on top of how the current infrastructure works.

We think that wherever there are huge ledgers that are constantly maintained, they can be replaced by chains. With that said, if you have anything in mind regarding this essay, hit us up at Yash Chandak and Lokesh Gaikwad to discuss more on this!